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This petition went up on the White House “We The People” website yesterday. They’re looking to get 100,000 signatures by April 19th. Since most politicians’ campaigns are largely funded by wealthy companies and individuals, it would give voters a better sense of who the candidate they are voting for is actually representing if the company’s logo, or individual’s name, was prominently displayed upon the candidate’s clothing at all public appearances and campaign events. Once elected, the candidate would be required to continue to wear those “sponsor’s” names during all official duties and visits to constituents. The size of a logo or name would vary with the size of a donation. For example, a $1 million dollar contribution would warrant a patch of about 4” by 8” on the chest, while a free meal from a lobbyist would be represented by a quarter-sized button. Individual donations under $1000 are exempt.

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There’s no shortage of cafes in Tokyo, but FabCafe has a little more on its menu than most. Opened just over a year ago, the establishment offers its own laser cutter that customers can rent by the hour, and also collaborates with the 3D printer showroom upstairs. The showroom is called Cube and features several printers made by South Carolina-based 3D Systems, making FabCafe a hot spot in Tokyo for anyone who needs something fabricated but can’t justify the multi-thousand dollar outlay on a machine of their own.

One and a half million laptops given to poor students by India’s largest state government crash if their users try to remove pre-loaded screen savers featuring pictures of the new chief minister.

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It’s hard to imagine how an entire city can get lost but that’s exactly what has happened to the lost cities on this list. There are actually many reasons why a city has to be abandoned. War, natural disasters, climate change and the loss of important trading partners to name a few. Whatever the cause, these lost cities were forgotten in time until they were rediscovered centuries later.

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When your life is nothing but trolling and viral videos, having a bad wi-fi connection can be incredibly irritating. Poor loading times, lost connections, and more can put a strain on your time browsing the internet. However, there are some ways to improve your Wi-Fi connection. However, even in the most bleak situation, there are heroes, and in this case it’s soda cans. If you’ve ever had a TV with an antenna or a radio, you’ve probably heard of the trick of using tin foil to improve the signal. Using a soda or beer can to improve your wi-fi signal works in a very similar way. The metal in the can and the shape of the can when cut open can focus the signal to and from your router. The only things that you’ll need to achieve this are a beer or soda can, a utility knife, a pair of scissors and some form of adhesive that can easily be removed like tape or adhesive putty.

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Authorities say the use of nitrous oxide as a recreational drug has grown from a rave party phenomenon to mainstream use, propelled by the ease of social media to reach young people. They say the drug has spurred fatal car accidents, rapes and teen deaths — all in the name of a temporary high that lasts just a few minutes and costs just a few dollars. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officials have zeroed in on the recreational use of the drug since September, cracking down on more than 350 illegal parties, nearly all of which were selling nitrous oxide, or “noz,” spokesman Mike Parker said Thursday.

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Authorities found two-2 gallon jugs of PCP concealed in containers of Lipton Sweet Tea in Allen’s Porsche on Nov. 5, 2012 when they raided a storage locker on Lake Road in Vermilion. A loaded handgun was also recovered from the storage locker but was not stolen. Allen was arrested the same day during a traffic stop in Westlake on I-90 after authorities found another gallon of PCP in the back of his Escalade, according to Lorain County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Dennis Cavanaugh, who also heads the Lorain County Drug Task Force. A total of 111,364 milliliters of PCP were recovered in total. The drug sells for $120 to $140 a gram, said Cavanaugh.

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One gram of heroin, two grams of cocaine, 25 grams of marijuana leaves or five grams of hashish: These are the drug quantities one can legally purchase and possess in Portugal, carrying them through the streets of Lisbon in a pants pocket, say, without fear of repercussion. MDMA — the active ingredient in ecstasy — and amphetamines — including speed and meth — can also be possessed in amounts up to one gram. That’s roughly enough of each of these drugs to last 10 days. These are the amounts listed in a table appended to Portugal’s Law 30/2000. Goulão participated in creating this law, which has put his country at the forefront of experimental approaches to drug control. Portugal paved a new path when it decided to decriminalize drugs of all kinds. “We figured perhaps this way we would be better able get things under control,” Goulão explains. “Criminalization certainly wasn’t working all that well.”

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As far as I can tell, police departments employ two main strategies when they’re under pressure to cut crime fast. In strategy no. 1, they flood crime zones with special police units that muscle criminals and contraband off the streets. In strategy no. 2, they simply downgrade crimes, or make it more difficult for citizens to report them. The Dallas police department chose the latter strategy last year when it announced that police officers would no longer respond in person to shoplifting incidents involving items worth $50 or less. Instead, victimized merchants were instructed to print a form off the DPD website, fill it out, and put it in the mail. According to the Dallas Morning News, the new process has been a huge hassle for merchants. “Retailers overwhelmingly described a time-consuming process with onerous paperwork requirements,” reported Tanya Eiserer and Steve Thompson.

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Over a third of Americans have a venereal disease, according to the CDC. At the present rate, those who have problems with their personal equipment will surpass those with jobs by the end of Obama’s second term. The CDC finding that 110,197,000 Americans have an STI (Sexually Transmitted Infection) was reported by CNS News. In 2008, the last year reported, 19.8 million Americans contracted STIs.

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Forty-five years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced mysticism, urged his hippie followers to “turn on, tune in and drop out”, researchers have found that magic mushrooms do change a user’s personality – for the better. The fungi have long been known for their psychedelic effects, but far from damaging the brain, the hallucinogenic drug they contain enhances feelings and aesthetic sensibilities, scientists say. The study, at Johns Hopkins University of Medicine in Baltimore, found that a single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, was enough to cause positive effects for up to a year. “Psilocybin can facilitate experiences that change how people perceive themselves and their environment,” said Roland Griffiths, a study author and professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at Johns Hopkins. “That’s unprecedented.”

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We score all 50 states on over 200 policies encompassing fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and personal freedom. We weight public policies according to the estimated costs that government restrictions on freedom impose on their victims.

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But what’s perhaps most troubling to Internet freedom advocates is how the new CFAA even expands the law to include accessing information for an “impermissible purpose,” which means even if you have the right to access the information in the first place, it’s still considered a crime if someone deems you are misusing your access in some way. According to Kerr, a computer law expert, the language in the new CFAA would make it a felony to “lie about your age on an online dating profile if you intended to contact someone online and ask them personal questions,” or if you violate the terms of service on a government website. “In short, this is a step backward, not a step forward,” Kerr said. “This is a proposal to give DOJ what it wants, not to amend the CFAA in a way that would narrow it.”

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In the new song, “You Don’t Even Know It,” by Rocko, Future, and Rick Ross, the self-proclaimed boss drops a troubling lyric that shows he knows very little about rape. Just after he opens his verse, Ross raps: “Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it / I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it.”

About two years ago, citizens in Cherán, Mexico decided to battle illegal logging and drug violence by kicking out the police and running the town according to indigenous tradition.

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The electric fields that build up on honey bees as they fly, flutter their wings, or rub body parts together may allow the insects to talk to each other, a new study suggests. Tests show that the electric fields, which can be quite strong, deflect the bees’ antennae, which, in turn, provide signals to the brain through specialized organs at their bases. Scientists have long known that flying insects gain an electrical charge when they buzz around. That charge, typically positive, accumulates as the wings zip through the air—much as electrical charge accumulates on a person shuffling across a carpet. And because an insect’s exoskeleton has a waxy surface that acts as an electrical insulator, that charge isn’t easily dissipated, even when the insect lands on objects, says Randolf Menzel, a neurobiologist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany.

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A selection of articles giving warning about the dangers of cloud computing… What’s going on with your notes, records, e-mail, photos, documents, videos, scans, etc.? Privacy, Encyption, and Government Back Doors in the Web 2.0 era Google connections to NSA/CIA Massachusetts Looking to Tax Cloud Services 51 Security Worries About Cloud Computing What’s In Your ‘Digital Wallet’? – Why They Are Pushing Digital Wallets… FBI Drive for Encryption Backdoors Is Deja Vu for Security Experts Postal Service to Host Public-Private ID Protection Network Encryption Could Drive Government to Break Into Your Cloud IRS Leaves Taxpayer Data Insecure, GAO Finds Is Your TV, Game System or Other Device Watching You? Feds: No Warrant Needed to Track Your Car with a GPS Device Driven by the Elite: Nasdaq on the Virtues of the Public Cloud The More You Encrypt, the More the Government Breaks Into Your Cloud Microsoft Details Law Enforcement Information Requests in New Report

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This was on my mind as much as the mysterious personality of David Bowie when an Irish cabbie drove Burroughs and me to Bowie’s London home on 17 November (“Strange blokes down this part of London, mate”). I had spent the last several weeks arranging this two-way interview. I had brought Bowie all of Burroughs’ novels: Naked Lunch, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded and the rest. He’d only had time to read Nova Express. Burroughs for his part had heard only two Bowie songs, ‘Five Years’ and ‘Starman’, though he had read all of Bowie’s lyrics. Still they had expressed interest in meeting each other.

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Take the example to the left. This terrifying contraption is called a ‘jugum penis.’ It was designed to prevent both masturbation and ‘nocturnal incontinence.’ Should a man become aroused in the middle of the night, this contraption would clamp down, extinguishing both his desire as well as his erection in a very sudden and painful way! But why were the Victorians so obsessed with what they termed ‘self-abuse?’ Many medical practitioners during this period believed that masturbation caused a wide range of mental and physical disorders, and could even prove fatal over time. Doctors and surgeons alike devoted their lives to finding a ‘cure.’

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Deputies were called to the Crestwood Suites on University Boulevard after multiple 911 callers “reported screaming and growling sounds from a room on the second floor” of the hotel. They arrived to find the victim “covered in a significant amount of blood, with numerous bite wounds,” the report states. He was rushed to the Orlando Regional Medical Center trauma center. The man had “significant” bites to his penis and testicles, the report states, as well as damage to his leg, abdomen, chest and fingers. His alleged attacker, Priscilla Vaughn, “was nude, and had blood around her mouth, which had spread to her face and head,” the report states, adding Vaughn “growled and snarled” at deputies.

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A team of international researchers headed up by the University of Michigan has used noninvasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to release endogenous opioids — the human body’s most powerful, euphoria-inducing painkillers that are very similar to opiates such as morphine. This approach is significant because releasing these opioids is as simple as strapping a couple of damp sponges to your scalp and attaching a 9-volt battery.

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Of course, most people have no idea what the police can pull off of your phone when it’s searched, but the ACLU has, thankfully, revealed some documents that ICE filed in a court case. It turns out they can get quite a lot. Using a single “data extraction session” they were able to pull: call activity phone book directory information stored voicemails and text messages photos and videos apps eight different passwords 659 geolocation points, including 227 cell towers and 403 WiFi networks with which the cell phone had previously connected.

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Roadkill salvage and consumption remains a fringe activity, mainly practiced by so-called “freegans” and other culinary subcultures. In Alaska, however, those who utilize soup kitchens are likely to have had a taste, since fresh roadkill is regularly given to charities. Interestingly, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which opposes most forms of hunting, has pushed states to adopt “roadkill salvage” legislation so as not to let animals go to waste.

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This website is designed as a social mirror to show the prevalence of casual homophobia in our society. Words and phrases like “faggot,” “dyke,” “no homo,” and “so gay” are used casually in everyday language, despite promoting the continued alienation, isolation and — in some tragic cases — suicide of sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ) youth.

CCTV footage released by West Midlands Police shows dozens of people running to be first in line as a drug dealer arrives in a Birmingham street.

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How is breast massage therapy performed? Breast massage therapy is performed with the patient lying flat on her back on a massage table. If the patient so desires, the massage may be performed with the breasts covered with a cloth. However, this greatly hinders the massage therapist and reduces the effectiveness of the massage. The massage therapist will usually start by massaging the area under the breast and over the breast with the palms of the hand. At any point in time if you are feeling uncomfortable or feel that too much of less pressure is being exerted, do not hesitate to tell your therapist. No therapist can read your mind. The therapist will then move to massage the sides of the breast. The next step of the massage is the breast lift. The therapist places his or her hands under your breasts and gently lifts them towards the ceiling. This helps to relieve stress from the breasts and promotes gentle stretching. Finally the therapist will gently massage the pectoral muscles.

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A dog in Oklahoma City came home on Saturday carrying a dead newborn in its mouth. A house sitter, whose name has not been released, was at the home at the time, KOCO reported. The house sitter told KFOR that the dog, a 6-month-old mixed-breed named Luke, showed up at the door with the body of a three to five-pound infant in his mouth. “He was carrying it just like a momma pup,” she told the station, “and laid it at my feet.”

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T.J. Lane will spend the rest of his life in prison for killing three students and wounding three others in the Chardon High School cafeteria Feb. 27, 2012. Before his sentence, Lane, wearing a white T-shirt with the word “killer” written across the front, said: “This hand that pulled the trigger that killed your sons now masturbates to the memory. F— all of you.”

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If any Foodie Flick could blow your mind, it’s this one. British comedian George Egg recently posted a YouTube video in which he cooks dinner in his hotel room. We’re not talking about a quick salad and sandwich here. Without bringing any special tools from home, Egg sweeps aside the overpriced room-service menu and makes pasta and biscuits in his room — from scratch. No hot plate. No microwave. If it wasn’t captured in a video, we probably wouldn’t believe it. The entrée? A tortellini pasta with spinach, rocket and crème fraîche that he cooks in the room’s tea kettle. This might not leave a desirable taste for the next poor sap who makes tea, but it’s a rather ingenious way to boil noodles. (He adds a raw egg yolk in a nod to carbonara; emulate that at your own risk.) Oh, but there’s more: Egg ups the ante by making biscuits (kneaded, risen, the whole 9 yards), using a clothes iron. Color us a new shade of impressed.

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The tools you need are simple: an electric drip coffee maker with hot plate, a coffee filter, 2 1-liter glass sample jars with air-tight lids, 2 handkerchiefs, 2 rubber bands, and a source of clean (preferably R/O) water. You’ll have to be more creative with your ingredients. Your need grains, malt, hops, and something for flavor. Simple grains such as those found in common cereals – Raisin Bran, Cracked Wheat, Kashi, whatever you can find – are decent sources of starches and usually contain enough enzymes to break the most complex proteins down. Fruit and nuts will add flavor, but are not important. The grains should be ground as fine as possible, rolled under a rolling pin or crushed in a mortar and pestle. The smaller the grains the greater the reactive surface area.

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Tawny Hickman, 18-year-old babysitter from Fort Pierce, Florida, has been arrested and faces charges of child abuse and battery of a 9-year-old boy. According to a report from the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office, the mother of the alleged victim had heard rumors around the neighborhood that “stuff was going on” and contacted local police after she found with hickeys her son’s neck. She said she didn’t want to believe the rumors but had to call 911 once she saw her son’s neck Sunday morning. The young boy told that he awoke in the middle of the night and went in to Hickman’s room “and laid with her.” According to reports Tawny Hickman claimed that she had took someone else’s prescription medication. Once in bed with her, he told police she bit his neck twice. The babysitter had what appeared to be hickeys on her lower stomach are that she says were made by the 9-year-old boy.

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Hale’s account of the role of racism and social injustice in Coca-Cola’s removal of coca is corroborated by the attitudes that the shaped subsequent U.S. cocaine regulation movement. Cocaine wasn’t even illegal until 1914 — 11 years after Coca-Cola’s change — but a massive surge in cocaine use was at its peak at the turn of the century. Recreational use increased five-fold in a period of less than two decades. During that time, racially oriented arguments about rape and other violence, and social effects more so than physical health concerns, came to shape the discussion. The same hypersexuality that was touted as a selling point during the short-lived glory days of Vin Mariani was now a crux of cocaine’s bigoted indictment. U.S. State Department official Dr. Hamilton Wright said in 1910, “The use of cocaine by the negroes of the South is one of the most elusive and troublesome questions which confront the enforcement of the law … often the direct incentive to the crime of rape …

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Equifax, one of the nation’s largest credit reporting agencies, has been selling the personal information of Americans to debt collectors and other businesses, according to an NBC News investigation. The Work Number, a company owned by Equifax, maintains “what may be the most powerful and thorough private database of Americans’ personal information ever created,” Bob Sullivan of NBC News reported. The database contains 190 million employment records, salary records and health insurance details involving more than 30% of all U.S. adults. And much of this data, including how much people have been paid, is sold to third parties, including bill collectors and banks. “It’s the biggest privacy breach in our time, and it’s legal and no one knows it’s going on,” Robert Mather, who runs a small employment background company named Pre-Employ.com, told the network news web site. “It’s like a secret CIA.”

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Whale vomit is also known as ambergris and is used to make perfume. It is formed in the digestive system of sperm whales and has a very strong and unpleasant aroma. Whales excrete it through the mouth when it is too large to pass through the digestive system. Perfume makers use it as it has a smell similar to musk.

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A particularly nasty new bit of drive-by malware has been discovered trying to extort money from users in Germany by accusing them of viewing child pornography. It’s a horrendous scare tactic to employ, but it’s also one that seems like it could be incredibly effective in deceiving innocent surfers. When confronted with such a horrific accusation, there’s no doubt that some would move quickly to comply in whatever way they were told was necessary.

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Such sites, going back to the infamous IsAnyoneUp revenge site run by Hunter Moore (aka The Most Hated Man on the Internet), are now protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states that websites aren’t liable for user-submitted content. Or as Mr. Moore interpreted his legal defense in an interview with BetaBeat’s Jessica Roy: “No one can do sh*t and I don’t give a f*ck.”

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To create a top-of-the-line fake gold bar, one that’s capable of being passed off as a real gold bar (the only kind we think worth making), you need to match the color, surface hardness, density, chemical, and nuclear properties of gold perfectly. To do this, you could start off with a tungsten slug about 3 mm smaller in each dimension than the finished gold bar, and then cast a 1.5 mm layer of pure gold all around it. This bar would feel right, it would have a dead ring when knocked (as gold does), it would test right chemically, it would weigh correctly, and it would also pass an x-ray fluorescence scan, the 1.5 mm layer of pure gold being more than enough to stop the x-rays from reaching any tungsten. You’d pretty much have to drill it to find out that it’s fake.

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The revelation of the Chinese hacking campaign against reporters working for the New York Times has raised awareness of targeted malware attacks, but what does the history of cyberattacks against media agencies look like? Here’s a short (and definitely incomplete) list of some of the stories we have seen over the years, where news agencies have fallen foul of hackers and cybercriminals

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“While many of the pictures were related to the defendant’s duties as yearbook advisor, investigators discovered that he secretly photographed his middle school female students by placing a camera under a table that would record images up the skirts of the female students while they sat in his classroom,” the documents said. The forensic analysis also showed that Hendricks magnified the pictures of students in an effort to enhance the images. Other images show that he took additional photographs and video recordings that attempted “to look down the shirts of female students in his classroom,” the documents said. The forensic examination also turned up evidence that Hendricks had attempted to use a computer technique called “flesh meshing” in an effort to manipulate images of clothed female students in a way that made them appear undressed. The investigators found a document on the computer entitled “How to Use Flesh-mesh X-ray in Photoshop.”

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I am standing chest-deep in a dank, muddy concrete-lined hole in Silver Lake, staring eye-level into a duffel bag full of high-grade drugs. It smells strongly of marijuana – despite the fact that someone sealed it tightly into jars, Ziplocs and professionally vacuum-sealed pouches before THEY HID IT IN MY BACK YARD. I am starting to panic. I already did the full Tex-Avery-wolf AOOOOGAH! upon discovering the mammoth sackful of dope – estimated to be worth somewhere north of $175,000. My jaw already dropped. My eyes already bugged out. Now my heart is thumping my gullet. Breathing is getting iffy. I try to speak. I think my exact words to the solar-panel technician standing equally open-mouthed next to me are something to the effect of “Holy. Fucking. SHIT!”

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Fujitsu’s “privacy mode” is a layer of nearly invisible security that hides missed calls, emails and text messages from contacts designated as private. If one of those acquaintances gets in touch, the only signal of that communication is a subtle change in the color or shape of how the battery sign or antenna bars are displayed. If ignored, the call doesn’t appear in the phone log. The changes are so subtle that it would be impossible to spot for an untrained eye. When the privacy mode is turned off through a secret combination of keys, the concealed calls and messages appear, and voice mail becomes accessible.

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Libraries have been deliberately or accidentally destroyed or badly damaged. Sometimes a library is purposely destroyed as a form of cultural cleansing.[citation needed] There are examples of accidentally destroyed libraries by human actions. Other times they are damaged by natural disasters like earthquakes, floods or accidental fires. Library fires have happened sporadically through the centuries: notable examples are the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the accidental burning of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar. Causes vary from arson to the sun’s rays setting fire to leaflets through the action of a magnifying lens in a library in Northam, Devon.

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An undercover cop made a sizable purchase of 140 bags of heroin last Thursday. Standard on the mean streets of Philly, but something was different about these baggies: they were labled “LeBron James“. Yep, The King himself is now officially an endorser of Philadelphia’s finest heroin!

Stupendous beauty game in which you’ll be able to put makeup on a normal, common girl with the latest emo style cosmetics. You’ll be able to combine them with the most daring hairstyles and with the most stylish accessories, such as earrings, piercings, etc.

Apple has allegedly threatened to sue Chinese company In Icons over its eerily realistic 12-inch action figure of Steve Jobs, the company’s late founder. The 1:6 scale model, which was said to be distributed by DiD Corp. in late February, comes with the clothes and accessories popularized by Jobs, such as the black faux turtleneck, blue jeans and sneakers. The figurine, which is packaged in a box that looks like Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” biography cover, also comes with a chair, a “One More Thing…” backdrop, as well as two red apples, including one with a bite in it. To make it extra creepy, the doll’s realistic head sculpt features Jobs’ famous unblinking stare.

We have all been lied to. For decades, the leaders of both major political parties have promised us that they can fix our current system and that they can get our national debt under control. As the 2012 election approaches, they are making all kinds of wild promises once again. Well you know what? It is all a giant sham. The United States has gotten into so much debt that there will be no coming back from this. The current system is irretrievably broken. 30 years ago the U.S. debt was a horrific crisis that was completely and totally out of control. If we would have dealt with it back then maybe we could have done something about it. But now it is 15 times larger, and we are adding more than a trillion dollars to the debt every single year.

Following a third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, Ron Paul held a boisterous rally, featuring a speech from Army Corporal Jesse Thorsen. Thorsen, who was in uniform, voiced impassioned support for Paul’s non-interventionist views. “We don’t need to be picking fights overseas,” he said, and pledged to help “make sure this man is the next president of the United States.” It was an understandable sentiment from a soldier who said he had served in the military for 10 years, which included tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the appearance likely violated the protocols for service members included in Defense Department Directive 1344.10, which states explicitly that they are not to participate in political rallies as anything more than spectators. And if they do attend a political function, they’re not supposed to do so in uniform.

Metal band Taake is nominated for the Norwegian Grammys in the category for best metal album for the album “Norway’s weapons,” which came out this fall. Besides the line of text devoted to “Moslems”, include “those who burn our flag,” called the swine in the song “Hurricane.” The text also says that hard to be against hard: “Now wake up soon Norway.”

A bluefin tuna caught off northeastern Japan fetched a record $736,000, Thursday in the first auction of the year at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. The price translates to $1,238 per pound — also a record, said Yutaka Hasegawa, a Tsukiji market official. Though the fish is undoubtedly high quality, the price has more to do with the celebratory atmosphere that surrounds the first auction of the year.

The link between “fracking”-related activities and earthquakes was thrown into stark relief over the weekend when a magnitude 4.0 quake struck Youngstown, Ohio – typically not a hot bed of noticeable seismic activity. The quake triggered shaking reportedly felt as as far away as Buffalo, N.Y., and Toronto. The temblor struck Dec. 31 and was the latest and strongest of 11 minor-to-light quakes that have hit the region since March. The epicenters are clustered around a wastewater injection well for a hydraulic fracturing operation.

A 36-year-old Denver woman, apparently drunk, leaned against an iconic Clyfford Still painting worth more than $30 million last week, punched it, slid down it and urinated on herself, according to a criminal case filed against Carmen Lucette Tisch. “It doesn’t appear she urinated on the painting or that the urine damaged it, so she’s not being charged with that,” Lynn Kimbrough, a spokeswoman for the Denver district attorney’s office, said Wednesday. “You have to wonder where her friends were.” Tisch is being charged with criminal mischief in the incident that happened at the Clyf ford Still Museum at 3:30 p.m. on Dec. 29. Damage to the painting — “1957-J-No. 2.” — is estimated at $10,000. The painting, which is nearly 9 1/2 feet tall and 13 feet wide, is estimated to be worth between $30 million and $40 million by the museum. Tisch allegedly committed the offense with her pants pulled down, according to the police report, and struck the painting repeatedly with her fist.

The latest example, found via Michael Scott is that the Sixth Circuit appeals court has overturned a district court ruling, and is now saying that a labor union can be sued for violating the CFAA because it asked members to email and call an employer many times, in an effort to protest certain actions. Now some of the volume may have hurt the business, but does it reach the level of hacking? What’s really troubling is even just the focus on emails:The e-mails wreaked more havoc: they overloaded Pulte’s system, which limits the number of e-mails in an inbox; and this, in turn, stalled normal business operations because Pulte’s employees could not access business-related e-mails or send e-mails to customers and vendors

“It looked like they were just going after white guys, white people,” Roffers told Wisconsin’s Newsradio 620.But while some witness accounts suggest the attacks are race-based, law enforcement officials say they have no evidence to prove it.

There was “no confession or anything else” to suggest the July 29 attacks in Philadelphia were “racially motivated,” Philadelphia Police Department First Deputy Commissioner Richard Ross told FoxNews.com.

“You can’t just simply look at the race of the offender and the race of the victim and say it’s ethnic intimidation. It may be, but we’re not sure. Does it give us pause? Yes it does,” Ross said.

Without a confession, a witness account or some epithet overheard by the victim, no charges will be filed related to ethnic intimidation or a hate crime, Ross said.

“If we don’t know and can’t prove it, we can’t charge it,” he said. “It’s just a very difficult charge to prove … We’re in the business of what we can prove, not what we think.”

“What you really have here is a trans-Atlantic clash,” said Franz Werro, who was born and raised in Switzerland and is now a law professor at Georgetown University. “The two cultures really aren’t going in the same direction when it comes to privacy rights. “For instance, in the United States, Mr. Werro said, courts have consistently found that the right to publish the truth about someone’s past supersedes any right to privacy. Europeans, he said, see things differently: “In Europe you don’t have the right to say anything about anybody, even if it is true.”

Mr. Werro says Europe sees the need to balance freedom of speech and the right to know against a person’s right to privacy or dignity, concepts often enshrined in European laws. The European perspective was shaped by the way information was collected and used against individuals under dictators like Franco and Hitler and under Communism. Government agencies routinely compiled dossiers on citizens as a means of control.

A federal judge has ruled that an inmate does not have a constitutionally protected right to matzoh and grape juice.Christopher Henry, who was convicted of first-degree sodomy, claimed “permanent trauma” and malnourishment and requested nearly $10 billion in damages for what he called a violation of his First Amendment right to religious freedom.

Oddly enough, Henry didn’t request matzoh for Passover, the Jewish holiday during which it is traditionally eaten. Instead, Henry claimed he had a right to have the unleavened bread served daily and grape juice every Friday.

But on August 2, U.S. Southern District Judge Shira Scheindlin held that the Rikers Island jail could deny Henry his request in the interests of maintaining order and keeping costs reasonable.

While studying the technology, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania overheard conversations that included descriptions of undercover agents and confidential informants, plans for forthcoming arrests and information on the technology used in surveillance operations.“We monitored sensitive transmissions about operations by agents in every Federal law enforcement agency in the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security,” wrote the researchers, who were led by computer science professor Matt Blaze and plan to reveal their findings Wednesday in a paper at the Usenix Security Symposium in San Francisco.

Their research also shows that the radios can be effectively jammed using a pink electronic child’s toy and that the standard used by the radios “provides a convenient means for an attacker” to continuously track the location of a radio’s user.

The veteran broadcaster Tavis Smiley and the author and Princeton University Professor Cornel West are in the midst of a 15-city, cross-country trek they have dubbed “The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience.” The tour comes on the heels of last week’s deficit agreement, which has been widely criticized for excluding a tax hike on the wealthy, as well as any measures to tackle high unemployment. “Any legislation that doesn’t extend unemployment benefits, doesn’t close a single corporate loophole, doesn’t raise one cent in terms of new revenue in terms of taxes on the rich or the lucky, allows corporate America to get away scot-free again—the banks, Wall Street getting away again—and all these cuts ostensibly on the backs of everyday people,” says Smiley.

“People are saying it’s a race issue now—blacks against Asians,” said Mykel Douglas, a black youth worker and resident of Winson Green, the working-class district northwest of Birmingham city center where the incident occurred. “It’s like the ethnic groups are at war with each other.”Outside the family home of one of the dead men, identified by local media as Haroon Jahan, a group of young Asians—mainly ethnic Pakistanis—vowed vengeance. “People are very angry,” said a bearded man in a shalwar kameez who declined to give his name. “There’s going to be retaliation. An eye for an eye.”

In May, the Rochester Police Department arrested a woman on a charge of obstructing governmental administration after she videotaped several officers’ search of a man’s car. The charge is a criminal misdemeanor.The only problem? Videotaping a police officer in public view is perfectly legal in New York state — and the woman was in her own front yard. The arrest report of the incident also contains an apparent discrepancy from what is seen in the woman’s own video.

Londoners took to the streets to protect their neighbourhoods on Tuesday night after Britain’s worst rioting in a generation. A group of anti-rioters marched through Enfield, in north London, aiming to deter looters. “We are the Enfield anti-rioting squad,” said one local resident. “You want to riot our place, we will riot you mate. This is our area not your area.” Another Enfield resident said his fellow vigilantes were the “people that are London, not the small minority that are going around smashing up stuff, that have got nothing to wake up for in the morning.”

By all accounts, the Redneck Olympics was a huge success.About 2,600 people attended the three-day event on Harold Brooks’ land last weekend. There were no arrests, and the one ambulance visit was for a bee sting, Brooks said.

But the party ended Monday when Brooks received a call from the legal division of the U.S. Olympic Committee. Brooks said the USOC told him he had to change the name of his event or face a lawsuit.

He was told the word “Olympics” is the property of the Olympic Committee. Brooks said it’s a case of a large group bullying a small businessman.

“I said, ‘I’m not basing it on your Olympics; I’m basing it on the Olympics in Greece,’” Brooks said.

“I understand we can’t use the word ‘Pepsi,’ but we can use the word ‘soda.’ The Olympics has been around for thousands of years.” He likened it to taking out a copyright on the word “fair” and trying to force the Fryeburg Fair to change its name.

Most bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics such as penicillin, discovered decades ago. However, such drugs are useless against viral infections, including influenza, the common cold, and deadly hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola.Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.

✪ Editorial: An Argument for Surrealism in Games

The problem I find most troubling with realism in games, is that video games are inherently unrealistic. By definition, even, video games must adhere to some sense of absurdity. In Uncharted, no matter how realistic and convincing the characters and environments may be, the fact is that Nathan Drake can take a hell of a lot of damage, and is a little too good with every gun known to man. In Call of Duty, if realism is such a coveted aspect of the series, why does your character only bleed out of his eyes, and why is damage rarely permanent? The “game” part of these games keeps them from being truly realistic, and in turn makes them even less believable. Characters like Link, or even Master Chief, are believable in even the most absurd situations, as the worlds that they belong to don’t try to conform to the world that we live in.

The Euro Union navy who patrol these waters would not interfere because they feared there could be casualties (!) All explanations are in Russian with a single exception of when a wounded pirate says something in English and the Russian soldier says “This is not a fishing boat.” All conversations between the commandos are in Russian but the pictures speak for themselves. The soldiers freed their compatriots and the tanker. The Russian Navy Commandos moved the pirates back to the pirate vessel, searched it for weapons and explosives, then left and blew it up with all remaining pirates hand-cuffed to it.They used the anti-piracy laws of the 18th and 19th centuries where the captain of the rescuing ship has the right to decide what to do with the pirates. Usually, they were legally hanged with no lawyers or court proceedings required. Perhaps from now on, Russian ships will not be targets for Somalian pirates.Other nations might take note. “Без суда и следствия”. Смотрите, девочки.

The pair of puppets has long been rumored to be a veiled representation of a gay couple, though the Children’s Television Workshop has denied that this is the case.The petition echoes the message of the “It Gets Better” project, founded in 2010 following the suicides of a number of young gay men, including Tyler Clementi, Billy Lucas and others.

Reactions thus far have been mixed. An editorial in the New York Daily News, headlined “Folks who want a gay marriage for Bert and Ernie of ‘Sesame Street’ need to get over themselves,” went on to say:

“Why stop there? Why not march Yogi Bear and Boo Boo down the aisle, too?… Some stages of life – for example, the years from 2 to 4 – must be walled off from the passions of adults.”

Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress agrees, but for different reasons. If Bert and Ernie were gay, she would be all for a marriage, but Rosenberg has a problem with same-sex roommates being equated with gay couples.

Protect IP has been criticized for its ambiguity as to what constitutes an infringing website. To illustrate this, websites such as The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks who have been accused of distributing copyrighted content in the past, could have all of their search results blocked on search engines, effectively making them invisible. This raises serious concerns about free speech when the blocked website also hosts legitimate and lawful content. Under the act, these blocks can be enforced without notifying the infringing site and therefore eradicates the presumption of innocence.

They piled onto the shuttle late, after finally getting corralled by their minder, who was nursing a head wound with an ice bag wrapped in a towel. They piled in, niggering everything in sight, motherfucking the driver, boasting into the air unbidden about getting their dicks sucked and calling everyone in the area a faggot. Then one of them lit a joint (or a pipe, I didn’t look) and told the driver to shut the fuck up nigger and smoked it anyway. A female passenger tried to engage one of them in conversation, but he just stared at her with a dead-to-me stare while his seatmate flipped double birds in her face.The whole trip they complained about not being at a McDonalds and repeatedly shouted for the motherfucker to pull over so they could get some fucking McDonalds nigger. Interspersed with the McDonalds requests were shouted boasts about how often they masturbated and fucked bitches nigger and got paid like a motherfucker fifty grand like a motherfucker

America is a mixture of many types of speech reflecting the cultures and backgrounds of its teeming millions. One type that is widely used, though not given recognition, serves a very important function in the lives of many people. This is the language of the homosexual.There are 2 ways in which homosexual slang is used. The first is when it is employed by the outsider or “straight” individual to describe or refer to homosexuals ar.d their activities. In this way the slang mirrors society’s disapproval and permits a person to talk of homosexuals without incurring any guilt by association.

The other, or “inside” language, is used by the homosexual and serves several purposes other than simple communication. It helps to transform the feeling of being a despised minority to that of a special in-group.

If you happen to know anything about Steve Albini, it’s almost certainly one or both of the following two things: (1) His reputation as a producer (Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey) and musician (Big Black, Shellac) is unassailable, and (2) He’s a bit of a curmudgeon, and he’s not at all shy about it. Albini’s most recent outburst came at the expense of Sonic Youth, whom he more or less blamed earlier this year for corrupting independent music. Well, “most recent outburst” until this weekend, actually, when Albini went at Odd Future.

Last year’s floods, which affected around 20 million people across the country, weren’t a natural disaster – they were a mistake on the part of our government.The government, in its effort to produce water, melted glaciers in the north using lasers. The experiment went awry and things got out of control, bringing forth the worst floods in the history of Pakistan.

You might dismiss the aforementioned as absurd, but this is precisely what most people ardently believe in flood-hit areas from Muzaffargarh to Rajanpur.

Though a year has passed since the floods hit and rehabilitation work is under way, locals in stricken areas still believe in conspiracy theories.

“Not just the common people but elected representatives of our areas have time and again said that lasers were used to melt glaciers and the water went out of control,” a local in Muzaffargarh, Malik Mureed, told The Express Tribune.

The NYPD has formed a new unit to track troublemakers who announce plans or brag about their crimes on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.Newly named Assistant Commissioner Kevin O’Connor, one of the department’s online and gang gurus, has been put in charge of the new juvenile justice unit. He and his staff will mine social media, looking for info about troublesome house parties, gang showdowns and other potential mayhem, sources said.

The power of social media to empower both criminals and cops has been on full display in London this week, where riots and looting have been spreading dramatically.

A new leukemia treatment is wowing even the researchers behind its creation, providing results beyond their wildest expectations.It’s virtually eradicated cancerous leukemia cells in the first three patients it’s been tested on.

In two of the first three patients the process was tested on the treatment completely destroyed the most common type of leukemia, according to MSNBC. In the third patient, the treatment seems to have reduced the cancerous cells to 70 percent of what they once were.

“Within three weeks, the tumors had been blown away, in a way that was much more violent than we ever expected,” said senior author Carl June, MD told Penn Medicine.

In news that makes you wonder if anyone from the US Department of Energy has watched the Terminator films, physicists at the Argonne National Laboratory have successfully created self-assembling micro-robots that are just 0.5mm (500 micron) in diameter.Formed out of minuscule ferromagnetic particles that float freely in a sandwich of water and oil, these micro-robots (microbots? nanobots?) are controlled with magnets. With the application of an alternating magnetic field that’s perpendicular to the immiscible mixture, the micro-particles assemble into spiked circles called asters, after the aster flower. Then, with a magnetic field that is parallel to the surface, the movements of these microbots can be controlled.

A study has found that the hustle and bustle of modern offices can lead to a 32% drop in workers well being and reduce their productivity by 15%.They have found that open plan offices create unwanted activity in the brains of workers that can get in the way of them doing the task at hand.

Open plan offices were first introduced in the 1950s and quickly became a popular as a way of laying out offices.

Having a clean and sterile desk can also leave employees with smaller brains, scientists claim.

These developments mean that we no longer have to worry just about what Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and other social sites do with our data; we have to worry about what they enable others to do, too. And it now seems that others will be able to do a lot.As reported in various privacy and security outlets like Kashmir Hill’s Forbes blog and Paul Roberts at ThreatPost, and demonstrated at last week’s Black Hat conference, the CMU researchers relied on just Facebook’s public profile information and off-the-shelf facial recognition software. Yet the CMU researchers were able to match Facebook users with their pictures on otherwise anonymous Match.com accounts. The researchers also had significant success taking pictures of experimental subjects and matching them to their Facebook profiles.

A man accused of disgusting McDonald’s patrons by popping his pimples was under arrest after customer complaints led to a brief chase by officers.It started Monday when customers of the McDonald’s located at 2404 Santa Barbara Blvd. alerted authorities to a man standing outside the restaurant for about 10 minutes squeezing away at the acne on his back. Events that followed with police ended in a brief chase and the arrest of the man, who allegedly gave a false name when confronted about the complaints.

Three of Italy’s best-known fashion houses are being accused of refusing to stop selling “killer jeans” that threaten the lives of workers in the poor countries where they are produced.The Clean Clothes Campaign began pressing in February for leading fashion manufacturers and retailers to ban sandblasting, a technique for producing denim garments with an artificially worn look. The large amounts of silica dust produced can lead to silicosis, a potentially lethal pulmonary disease.

The process was banned in Turkey in 2009 after evidence was produced to show that 46 former sandblasting operators had contracted silicosis

In a 1968 plane crash, the US military lost an atom bomb in Greenland’s Arctic ice. But this was no isolated case. Up to 50 nuclear warheads are believed to have gone missing during the Cold War, and not all of them are in unpopulated areas.

Twitter has refused to close the accounts of London rioters who used the service to spread unrest and insisted that Tweets must ‘continue to flow’.The US-based company said that ‘freedom of expression’ was essential and that information would be ‘kept flowing’.

Social networks have faced criticism for allowing rioters and looters to incite violence and public disorder across the country since riots began last Saturday in Tottenham.

✪ Hong Kong exchange trading disrupted as hackers target website

The Hong Kong stock exchange was forced to suspend trading in stocks including HSBC Holdings after hackers broke into the exchange’s website on Wednesday, preventing investors from accessing company announcements made during the midday break.”Our current assessment that this is a result of a malicious attack by outside hacking,” the chief executive of Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing (HKEx) Charles Li told reporters after the company announced interim results.

A 25-year-old man sued the Gretna Police Department Tuesday, alleging his civil rights were violated by a police officer who sicced his canine on him without provocation, leading the dog to bite into his groin area and virtually sever his penis.cody_melancon.jpgView full sizeSusan Poag,The Times-PicayuneCody Melancon alleges his civil rights were violated by a police officer who sicced his canine on him without provocation.Cody Melancon, of Gretna, said Tuesday the attack left him sexually dysfunctional. A doctor has recommended sexual enhancement pills and he faces neurosurgery in hopes of restoring the use of his penis, which was almost completely severed by the police dog’s bites.“I don’t have any sensation down there,” Melancon said. “I can’t get an erection. I’m 25 years of age.”

✪ Teenage brides suffer pain and shame of fistula

“Nobody wants a woman who passes stools all the time and smells,” whispered Farhiya Mohamed Farah, explaining why her husband divorced her when she was pregnant with their second child.Farah, developed a hole between her vagina and rectum, causing feces to leak from her body, after giving birth to her first child at age 18 while fleeing gunfire in Somalia.

The guy who did more than anyone to let singers sound not like themselves now is demanding an injunction to prevent Antavares from using his name, photograph, likeness, and oh yes, his voice.

While heroin users can pick up clean needles from needle-exchange programs or the city’s controversial safe-injection site, crack pipes are more difficult to come by.Some crack smokers can afford to buy small glass or Pyrex stems to use as pipes. Others fashion makeshift pipes from bottles, cans or even hollow car antennas. And in many cases, they just simply share, potentially putting themselves at risk of contracting disease.

It’s part of the city’s harm-reduction strategy that seeks to reduce the transmission of disease while ensuring health-care and social workers are able to interact with hard-to-reach drug addicts.

Drug traffickers faced with restrictions to transit routes through Asia and the Middle East are turning to eastern Africa, driving up instability and increasing substance abuse, a United Nations report said.

With the increase in propaganda being pushed by the mainstream media government police state agencies regarding “right wing extremists” and “domestic terrorists,” many are no longer surprised when law enforcement or government agents single out individuals or groups that may express controversial or unpopular points of view, or even points of view that are simply critical of government or its agents.Most people are content to accept the fact that these types of free speech violations happen but that they happen somewhere else like New York or Los Angeles where any number of things can happen on any given day.

However, some South Carolina residents are receiving a wake-up call today, as police in Kershaw County have been placed on alert for “people out there that might want to hurt them.” The reason for the alert? An article that was posted to a Facebook page and an individual that “liked” it.

A new study in mice has found that activating a receptor affected by marijuana can dramatically reduce cocaine consumption. The research suggests that new anti-addiction drugs might be developed using synthetic versions of cannabidiol (CBD), the marijuana component that activates the receptor—or even by using the purified natural compound itself.Researchers formerly believed that the receptor, known as CB2, was not found in the brain and that therefore CBD had no psychoactive effects. But a growing body of research suggests otherwise. After THC, CBD is the second most prevalent active compound in marijuana.

NASA has warned of a once-in-a-lifetime ‘space storm’ after the sun wakes ‘from a deep slumber’ sometime around 2013, causing ‘20 times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina’.Senior space agency scientists believe that the super storm would hit like ‘a bolt of lightning’ and damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.

And unless precautions are taken, it could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security.

Wealthy buyers are flocking to a little-known archipelago in the Bahamas, fueling an island building boom. Privacy comes at a price: Owning a personal island means importing everything from water to electricity.

As I write these words, the corporate media talking heads are shoving polls at their audience which indicate that Americans want the budget balanced, taxes to be held where they are, no increase in the debt ceiling, and do not want to see cuts to social services. The talking heads and the politicians are screaming that the public is sending “mixed messages” which means Congress and Obama “just have to” do what they think is best.But nothing could be further from the truth. The message is not mixed at all; the corporate media is simply refusing to see the message for what it is. They are ignoring the real message by We The People to the US Government

Radiation is leaking, the analyst says. He also mentions the high-speed train accident, and says there are 259 people dead so far. It was reported by Mamoru Sato on his blog on July 30.I have no idea who he really is, but the bio on his blog says he was a fighter pilot in the Self Defense Air Force of Japan, and was then a high-ranking officer and the commander of the several major air force bases in Japan until he retired from the service in 1997. Checking the biography in Wiki, it looks like he is indeed what he says he is.According to the information I just obtained, a nuclear submarine of the Chinese Navy had an accident in the port of Dalian on July 29, and there is a leak of radiation. The area is strictly closed off by the Chinese military, and the situation is said to be very dangerous. I doubt that the Chinese government will announce the accident. The neighboring countries should take defensive measures, and the Japanese fishing boats in the area should be careful.

Vulnerabilities in electronic systems that control prison doors could allow hackers or others to spring prisoners from their jail cells, according to researchers.Some of the same vulnerabilities that the Stuxnet superworm used to sabotage centrifuges at a nuclear plant in Iran exist in the country’s top high-security prisons, according to security consultant and engineer John Strauchs, who plans to discuss the issue and demonstrate an exploit against the systems at the DefCon hacker conference next week in Las Vegas.

Strauchs, who says he engineered or consulted on electronic security systems in more than 100 prisons, courthouses and police stations throughout the U.S. — including eight maximum-security prisons — says the prisons use programmable logic controllers to control locks on cells and other facility doors and gates. PLCs are the same devices that Stuxnet exploited to attack centrifuges in Iran.

U.S. communities should be encouraged to vie for a federal nuclear-waste site as a way to end a decades-long dilemma over disposing of spent radioactive fuel, a commission established by President Barack Obama said.A “consent-based” approach will help cut costs and end delays caused when the federal government picks a site over the objections of local residents, the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future said today in a draft report to Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

“This means encouraging communities to volunteer to be considered to host a new nuclear-waste management facility,” the commission said in an executive summary of its draft report.

Advertisers routinely touch up models’ faces for magazine ads, but L’Oreal may have gone too far. Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority banned two of the company’s ads, calling them misleading, an exaggeration.One ad features Christy Turlington, the other Julia Roberts. They’re both in their 40s, and apparently they look too good. Regulators thought there was too much digital retouching.

Acid, ecstasy, rave, underground, tripping, shoom, rampling, larging it, acid teds, Mitsubishis, LSD, giving it some, weekender, tribal, sorted, lovely.None of the above were words in common usage in Britain in 1987. If you heard the word rave it was most likely spoken by your parents to describe their halcyonic youthful antics.

But by the end of 1988 all that had changed. The Second Summer of Love had come and gone, it had loved us and threw us out in the morning, dazed and confused. But what the hell was it and where did it come from?

✦ Kurt Cobain was here – are we bold enough to claim his name?

It’s been sort of sad over the years seeing three cities – the hangdog trio of Aberdeen, Olympia and Tacoma – compete for their fair share of the legacy of Kurt Cobain, the rocker who helped bring grunge fame to Seattle.So color us surprised to learn that the Aberdeen City Council voted this week against renaming a bridge in honor of the Nirvana front man, who died in 1994.

The man who led Milwaukee police to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer 20 years ago was charged Friday in the death of a homeless man who drowned after he was thrown off a bridge.

The 51-year-old Queens man, who suffered sinus problems and then throat cancer after months of removing toxic debris from the World Financial Center, was relieved to get a check in the mail for his court settlement with Merrill Lynch, whose offices he had cleaned.But he was stunned when he saw the amount: $0.00.

The 31-year-old Vietnamese man has had a tumor growing on his right leg since soon after he was born.

Despite having an amputation at the knee 14 years ago, he still has a growth wider than three feet.

In reality, in China, the word kung fu can also relate to non-martial arts contexts and can come to mean any individual accomplishment or skill cultivated through long and hard work.

Bai Dengchun, age 23, who hails from northern China’s Shandong Province, can throw cards with such force and accuracy that from as far as 16 feet away he can slice a cucumber or burst a balloon. He can also crack an egg or knock off the end of a lit cigarette from a smoker’s mouth.

Hwang, a 66-years-old fisherman living in the near area, said he has never seen anything like this in his whole life and that the fish was tied with ropes when it was first found.

Thousands of bicyclists took to the streets of Portland, Oregon on Saturday night, riding in hordes across meandering avenues of asphalt on their two-wheelers.

As 20-somethings populate the Pacific Northwest hipster hub and rally for bicyclists rights and recognition of their rides, is it really all that weird? Not quite. Until you do it bare-ass naked, that is. That’s what most of them did on Saturday’s moon-lit annual installment of the World Naked Bike Ride.

Which is more important: upholding share prices or stopping pollution? The Japanese political and business world has sunk to a level where it can’t even answer such a question.

Representing the first time the substance has been detected at the crippled plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) reported on Sunday that seawater and groundwater samples taken near the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility in Japan have tested positive for radioactive strontium. And according to a recent report in The Japan Times, levels of strontium detected were up to 240 times over the legal limit, indicating a serious environmental and health threat.

In news that will surely set off a whole lot of red flags and pique the interest of many, Green Mile actor Doug Hutchison tied the knot with singer Courtney Stodden this week. Not sure why that’s newsworthy or so interesting? Well, Hutchison is 51 years old, and Stodden is … wait for it … 16.

As record floodwaters along the Missouri River drench homes and businesses, concerns have grown about keeping a couple of notable structures dry: two riverside nuclear power plants in Nebraska.

As the mainstream media continues to be obsessed with Anthony Weiner and his bizarre adventures on Twitter, much more serious events are happening around the world that are getting very little attention. In America today, if the mainstream media does not cover something it is almost as if it never happened. Right now, the worst nuclear disaster in human history continues to unfold in Japan , U.S. nuclear facilities are being threatened by flood waters, the U.S. military is bombing Yemen, gigantic cracks in the earth are appearing all over the globe and the largest wildfire in Arizona history is causing immense devastation. But Anthony Weiner, Bristol Palin and Miss USA are what the mainstream media want to tell us about and most Americans are buying it.

Hundreds of Big Bear High School yearbooks have been recalled because of a picture showing a 17-year-old boy with his hand up his date’s dress, officials said Thursday.

The photo may involve sexual penetration and constitutes child pornography, said Cindy Bachman, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

✪ Woman says she’s too ‘educated’ to be kicked off New York train

A woman traveling on New York’s Metro North train line was recorded by a fellow passenger telling train employees that she is too “well-educated” to be told to quiet down and not use profanity in her cell-phone conversation.

“Do you know what schools I’ve been to? How well-educated I am?” she asks the train employee, who is seen explaining to another employee that she asked the passenger to stop using the “F-bomb.”

“I’m sorry do you think I’m a little hoodlum?” she asks, then demands her money back and dares the conductor to stop the train.

Black hole fires beams at Earth while destroying star: a massive black hole has been discovered devouring a star, causing the star to shoot beams of energy at Earth. The event is thought to occur only once every 100 million years.

Virtually every article about the flooding mentions that the Fort Calhoun plant was shut down on April 9. On May 27, the Omaha World-Herald reported, “The Omaha Public Power District said its nuclear plant at Fort Calhoun, which is shut down for maintenance, is safe from flooding.” The implication is that being shut down makes a plant safe. But as the ongoing crisis in Fukushima demonstrates, nuclear fuel remains hot long after a reactor is shut down. When Fort Calhoun is shut down for maintenance and refueling, only one-third of the fuel in the reactor core is removed. Besides the hot fuel remaining in the core, there is even more fuel stored in the spent-fuel pool, which is not shut down. According to a May 2011 report by Robert Alvarez at the Institute for Policy Studies, there are an estimated 1,054 assemblies of spent fuel, weighing 379 tons, at Fort Calhoun.

Three hundred miles southwest of Fukushima, at a nuclear reactor perched on the slopes of this rustic peninsula, engineers are engaged in another precarious struggle. The Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor — a long-troubled national project — has been in a precarious state of shutdown since a 3.3-ton device crashed into the reactor’s inner vessel, cutting off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods at its core. Engineers have tried repeatedly since the accident last August to recover the device, which appears to have gotten stuck. They will make another attempt as early as next week.

US scientists claim to have discovered a dangerous new plant disease linked to genetically modified crops and the pesticides used on them.

The research, which is yet to be completed, suggests the pathogen could be the cause of recent widespread crop failure and miscarriages in livestock.

Emeritus Professor Don Huber from Perdue University says his research shows that animals fed on GM corn or soybeans may suffer serious health problems due to the pathogen.

“They’re finding anywhere from 20 per cent to as much as 55 per cent of those [animals] will miscarriage or spontaneously abort,” he said.

✪ Formative Experiences with Nude Imagery

I’m 35. I come from an era in which pre-teens had to go on cultural-archeological digs not just for porn, but also for punk music, so-called art house movies, strange literature, and underground comics. We shoplifted, sent away for zines and catalogs, and traded with each other to get our hands on contraband materials. But something we probably have in common with the youth of today, and all kids ever, is that when we were even younger, images seem to have sought us out—not the other way around. That brings me, finally, to the subject of this post, which is a few of the images that, at some point early in my life, lodged themselves into the nascent “this is what turns you on” portion of my brain. These things are running around in there even now, perhaps a little more spectral with each year, but working their influence nonetheless.

The table of five had just minutes earlier ordered dessert: two helpings of Bananas Foster, a sweet, spectacular flambe dish sauteed in butter and ignited with rum.

But as server Ian Monsalvo poured the 151-proof liquor into the pan, a sudden burst of flames erupted. Caught in the blaze was Hudgins, 25, an elementary school teacher, whose fiance’s parents had invited her to dinner.

Nick Salzer, 20, an Ozona Blue chef and aspiring firefighter, raced from the kitchen, tore off Hudgins’ burning dress and stomped out the flames. With others, he guided Hudgins to a couch in the lobby and covered her with a blanket as an unidentified woman frantically called 911.

General sluttiness is surely among the attributes preening liberals refer to when they bray about “San Francisco Values.” From the Mission to the Marina, from the “soiled doves” who ruled the Barbary Coast to the present-day skank chain-smoking in front of Vertigo, we are a city of the lecherous, the depraved, and the polyamorous.

This open secret is confirmed in a new study commissioned by condom-maker Trojan, which found that among residents of the major U.S. cities surveyed, San Franciscans reported having had sex with the greatest number of people. We clocked in at an average of 30 partners. (Not all at once, mind you — even San Franciscans face certain physical limitations.) At the bottom of the list were Chicagoans, who reported, on average, having had 11 partners.

An escaped convict was caught following a day on the loose after he knocked on the door of a cabin in the woods – only to find out the man renting the lodge was an off-duty guard at the prison he just fled.

Researchers looking for signs of life elsewhere in the universe often start by looking for one key ingredient necessary to complex life as we know it: water. And just 750 light-years away, they’ve found quite a bit of it spewing from the poles of a young, sunlike star that is blasting jets of H2O into interstellar space at 124,000 miles per hour.

Whereas descriptions of online addiction are controversial at best among researchers, a new study cuts through much of the debate and hints that excessive time online can physically rewire a brain.

The work, published June 3 in PLoS ONE, suggests self-assessed Internet addiction, primarily through online multiplayer games, rewires structures deep in the brain. What’s more, surface-level brain matter appears to shrink in step with the duration of online addiction.

“I’d be surprised if playing online games for 10 to 12 hours a day didn’t change the brain,” says neuroscientist Nora Volkow of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who wasn’t involved in the study. “The reason why Internet addiction isn’t a widely recognized disorder is a lack of scientific evidence. Studies like this are exactly what is needed to recognize and settle on its diagnostic criteria,” she says.

A British student is facing extradition to the United States and up to five years in jail for running a website that offered links to pirated films and television shows.

✪ UFO over Mexico City

A research team from Open Minds captured photos of a strange, seemingly biologic UFO in the sky above Mexico City. For more details, you can read the full story in the August/September 2010 issue of Open Minds magazine.

A Montana resident says an energy company has identified the cause of a brief power outage as “deer with wings.” Lee Bridges says she was outside with her dogs around the time the power went out when a NorthWestern Energy truck pulled up, giving her a chance to ask the driver what caused the problem.

She says he pointed up and said, “Apparently, we’ve got deer with wings.”

“Once you go outside the hoard and you start covering that unions and workers are fighting against cut-backs from a powerful mayor and they want Wall Street to pay higher taxes, well, those are likely your sponsors if you are a big commercial news operation,” explained journalism Professor Jeff Cohen.

As the media treads carefully around the issues, the people’s anger is growing – so how many will be camping out here before the media is shaken out of its self-imposed oblivion to report what matters?

The TSA, in alliance with a whole host of federal, state, local agencies as well as military personnel, is currently conducting a massive “security exercise” throughout Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia.

“The participating teams are composed of a variety of TSA assets including federal air marshals, canine teams, inspectors and bomb appraisal officers. They will be joined by state and local law enforcement officials to supplement existing resources, provide detection and response capabilities. The exercise will utilize multiple airborne assets, including Blackhawk helicopters and fixed wing aircraft as well as waterborne and surface teams,” reports the Marietta Times.

Although the exercise is couched in serious rhetoric about preparedness, it relates to “no specific threat” and the details are nebulous to say the least and seems to revolve around little else than testing out high-tech surveillance equipment and reminding Americans who their bosses are.

Located about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, the largest city in Nebraska, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant is owned by Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) who on their website denies their plant is at a “Level 4” emergency by stating: “This terminology is not accurate, and is not how emergencies at nuclear power plants are classified.”

Russian atomic scientists in this FAAE report, however, say that this OPPD statement is an “outright falsehood” as all nuclear plants in the world operate under the guidelines of the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) which clearly states the “events” occurring at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant do, indeed, put it in the “Level 4” emergency category of an “accident with local consequences” thus making this one of the worst nuclear accidents in US history.

A 45-year-old man now living in the Bay Area may be the first person ever cured of the deadly disease AIDS, the result of the discovery of an apparent HIV immunity gene.

Timothy Ray Brown tested positive for HIV back in 1995, but has now entered scientific journals as the first man in world history to have that HIV virus completely eliminated from his body in what doctors call a “functional cure.”

Brown was living in Berlin, Germany back in 2007, dealing with HIV and leukemia, when scientists there gave him a bone marrow stem cell transplant that had astounding results.

Stumped for an original name for their newborn daughter, an Israeli couple took inspiration from social networking site Facebook and named her “Like,” Israeli daily Maariv reported on Monday.

The parents lifted the name from the popular feature on the site, which allows Facebook users to click on the word “like” and give the thumbs-up to comments, links and pictures posted by other users.

“We named her Like because it’s modern and innovative,” father Lior Adler told the mass-circulation paper. “I checked that the name does not exist elsewhere in the country, that was the main condition for me,” he said.

“In our opinion it’s the modern equivalent of the name Ahava (Love) he added. “It’s just my way of saying to my fantastic daughter, ‘love.'”

A group of researchers working at the Human Genome Project will be announcing soon that they made an astonishing scientific discovery: They believe so-called non-coding sequences (97%) in human DNA is no less than genetic code of an unknown extraterrestrial life form.

The non-coding sequences are common to all living organisms on Earth, from molds to fish to humans. In human DNA, they constitute larger part of the total genome, says Prof. Sam Chang, the group leader. Non-coding sequences, also known as “junk DNA”, were discovered years ago, and their function remains mystery.

Unlike normal genes, which carry the information that intracellular machinery uses to synthesize proteins, enzymes and other chemicals produced by our bodies, non-coding sequences are never used for any purpose. They are never expressed, meaning that the information they carry is never read, no substance is synthesized and they have no function at all. We exist on only 3% of our DNA.

Sometimes we travel to see a beautiful landscape, a precious artifact or a well-known painting. But other times our purpose is to experience something a little darker: to see a concentration camp where thousands of people were gassed to death, to visit a natural disaster zone that we’ve seen plastered across our TV screens, or to gawk at people living in poverty, sometimes with the intention of trying to help them.

All of these things and more have been encapsulated recently by the umbrella term of dark tourism. And while some people are quick to say they’d never be involved in something with a name like dark tourism, the scope is broad and you might be a dark tourist without realizing it.

Close allies of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being “magicians” and invoking djinns (spirits).

Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as “a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds”.

Summary: At Beijing’s Songzhuang [art district], 57-year-old artist Cheng Li performed sexual behavior as an art exhibition, was taken away by police, and was sentenced to 1 year of re-education through labor. Re-education Through Labor Administration Committee documents show that “Cheng Li’s engaged in an obscene performance in the nude, attracting many onlookers, creating chaos at the scene”, establishing that he has created a public disturbance. Cheng Li’s lawyer is already in the process of applying for administrative reconsideration. Netizens engaged in intense discussion with regards to whether this was art or obscene.